Initial Steps to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy - Social Media Content Guide for MSMEs Part I

The content you share on social media can transform your brand into a household name and turn your followers into loyal fans. To achieve this kind of impact, you need a solid social media content strategy.

Before continuing, I need to say first that this is the first part of a series Social Media Content Guide for MSMEs which will then completely discuss the steps for creating content for your social media promotion needs, starting from general knowledge to concrete guides for finding ideas, editing content, making posters, and so on.

OK, now let's go into the discussion of the first part.

1. Determine and Set Goals

The first step in designing a long-term social media strategy is determining your content goals. By having clear goals, you can plan what type of content to create.

This process involves a deep understanding of your brand values ​​and research about your audience.

Here are some business goals that can be used as a benchmark:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Identifying new prospects.
• Improve customer service.
• Increase traffic to your online store.
• Increase engagement with customers.

2. Research Your Audience

You can't create great content without knowing who the target is. Having buyer personas for social media will help you in planning content.

Before you start formulating ideas for content and engagement strategies, you just need to do your homework and tackle audience research.

Check the demographics of your ideal target audience, such as age, gender, interests, location, language, and other relevant factors.

While there are many reports, surveys, trend compilations, and industry studies you can use, it's better to get input and insights from your existing followers and analyze your own audience demographic data.

Then, gather insights into how your potential customers talk about your brand, industry, and products.

3. Analyze Your Social Media Competitors

To understand how your social media content strategy is working, you need to look beyond your own data. Competitive analysis can provide content ideas and create a better benchmark for your strategy.

In analyzing competition on social media, we need to know:

• What type of content are competitors creating?
• What themes do they often raise?
• Are they only active on one platform or spread across several social media?
• How do they engage followers with their content strategy?
• Is there regularity in their schedule of posting on social media?

4. Audit Your Current Social Media Content

Once you understand your audience and goals, it's time to audit the social media content you've created. A content audit is one of the best ways to find out how to create a social media content strategy that suits your brand.

Reviewing your social media channels includes:

• Confirming the content and engagement strategies that have been implemented
• Measuring the effectiveness of the approach
• Knowing which platform is most efficient in reaching your audience
• Identify trends that can be applied to social media activities
• Find the types of content and themes that are most in demand

In other words, when conducting a social media study, you are ruthlessly assessing your channels to see what is effective and what needs improvement.

The more honest the assessment, the better - don't ignore weaknesses, and avoid building a social media strategy based on assumptions.

You also need to specify these steps:

• Leave platforms that don't support your goals.
• Fix errors, outdated information and old graphics.
• Develop a platform where you get a good response.
• Remove irrelevant or incorrect content and assumptions.
• Rewrite profiles and other assets that may be inaccurate.

5. Create a Content Calendar

Once you know what's most effective and determined your main goals, it's time to create a social media content calendar. This calendar will help you visualize your ideas and organize them.

Your social media content calendar should have these sections:

• Social media channels - which social media platforms you will use to post.
• Posting schedule - when and what content should be posted.
• Content type - what format to use (e.g. GIF, video, photo, text).
• Target audience - who do you want to reach with this post?
• Performance tracking - have you achieved your desired goals?
• Theme - You may want to separate educational content from engaging video content or advertisements.

6. Establish KPIs

Above we talked about social media marketing. Although the two sound similar, they are actually different.

The goal of social media marketing is more towards a big vision: what we want to achieve. Meanwhile, KPI is a measuring tool that shows whether we have succeeded in achieving that goal or not.

For example, having a vision of "Increasing reach on social media" is good, but lacks specificity. It's better if we say "Increase reach on social media for target group by 10% by Q1 2023".

Some KPIs you can consider in your social media strategy include:

• The level of engagement on your video content.
• How widely your content is seen by your target audience (e.g. Twitter or Facebook users).
• How many leads your social media campaign generated.
• Cost per lead for each social media marketing channel.
• New subscriber growth on your YouTube channel.

7. Measuring Results

The final step in an effective social media content strategy is measuring the results. Proper tracking is critical to creating a strategy with staying power. By monitoring metrics in detail, you can adjust and optimize your plan over time.

Every day, you have to ensure several things:

• The content you publish is interesting or needs improvement.
• Your social media posts are effective or not.
• Your social media campaigns either produce results or they don't.

You can track and analyze almost any data related to social media performance, however, you should focus on the aspects that are most crucial to your social media strategy.

However, analytics is just the first step - you need to use the data as input and optimize your social media strategy accordingly.

You won't fix everything overnight, as it takes time and experimentation.

Plan ahead, review the results, learn from them, try different social media formats, and adjust your social media strategy for better performance.